Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Who Could Have Foreseen It?

We’ve been monitoring the collapse of January’s Senate rules reform
agreement... mostly through the lens of
presidential nominations. But this week brings... exciting new
examples of its colossal failure.... [F]or instance... recent... must-pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown.... [S]ome Republicans weren’t allowed votes on their amendments. Then
instead of accepting the fact that the bill has supermajority support,
they wasted three legislative days [in] protest... [T]he filibuster reform flop is also partially to blame for the early demise of Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons ban.... One of the putative goals of the new rules was to limit the
minority’s ability to filibuster what’s known as the motion to proceed --
to stop the minority from preventing the Senate from simply debating an
issue. The compromise essentially gave the majority and minority
leaders more control over that choke point, but didn’t eliminate it
entirely. Then on Tuesday, Harry Reid said the A[ssault]W[eapons]B[an] couldn’t be included in the
underlying bill because if it were it would succumb to a filibuster on
the motion to proceed.

Republicans indulging in historically unprecedented abuse of the filibuster to obstruct popular commonsense Democratic policies promise to behave better if reforms to make them behave better are not enacted immediately break their promise and behave just as badly anyway? Who could have foreseen it?